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Creative Staff:
Story: Cullen Bunn
Art: Jesus Saiz
Colors: Jesus Saiz
What They Say:
John Stewart desperately tries to keep his small band of Lanterns alive. And if they’re going to make their way home, they will have to team up with some of their deadliest former foes!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With the series having been shifted just before the release of the fourth issue from an ongoing to a six issue run and then hearing that the story will possibly, maybe, be dealt with somewhere else if someone gets the opportunity, it’s easy to imagine enthusiasm waned considerably for the title. I had actually thought I had canceled my digital subscription to this, but alas, I did not. so now I find myself compelled through inertia to finish it. It’s not that I found the story bad, though I had problems with it so far with its pacing and frustrating lack of basic answers to make it compelling, but I liked the idea of a group on their own in a whole other time and place struggling with what their actions would result in. It’s got potential, but it just fell flat in several ways.
Of course, after a few frustrating issues, it’s no surprise that this installment is starting to show some promise. While we get another lackluster lesson in what it means to be John Stewart at the start as we see more of his Marine days, the time in the present is pretty good as he and the others try to figure out how to get free of the prison that the light pirates have put them in. It makes sense to hold onto the prisoners for the short term while trying to figure out their rings and how to drain ‘em dry, and we got some middling at best material from Guy last time around as he jockeyed for position like a good beta male who wants to be more. John continues to handle it all well by just focusing on plans and keeping things moving even while dealing with Salaak and the way he keeps talking about other eventualities. Things do come together though and it all shifts into action mode once B’dg brings them a few functioning power rings.
The prison break aspect is quite fun overall since there’s a lot of great layouts and sequences from Saiz that makes it engaging to read through. The narration from Stewart just left me kind of bored because it’s so boilerplate and a lot of it is reflected in how he deals with everyone else while trying to come across as the unapproachable commander that gets things done. There are a few nice moments dealing with the difficulty of the situation, the desire to help even though from their point of view this has all happened and ended, and we even get a nice nod towards the light pirates being moderately smart by trying to reverse engineer the rings. I even liked the way that Salaak works over some other devices to utilize as ring substitutes, though I hope they don’t stick – especially Kilowog’s wizard-club. But all of it is designed to get the group together, suffer a loss or two and then get moving on to trying to find others before the light pirates regroup and come after them. I’m really interested in where it’s going to go with Mogo, but with just one more issue left expectations are pretty well tempered.
In Summary:
Green Lantern: Lost Army begins to pull things together a bit here and a good portion of that was just Saiz’s artwork in making for a fun and engaging prison break sequence. Having a couple of more interesting characters around doesn’t hurt either and I liked the weirdness in how the team comes together with items combined with Guy’s costume due to his power usage. There’s not a lot of story progression here and I’m not expecting any to happen either, but there was a lot more enjoyment out of this issue even if answers are still not forthcoming. The book looks to be turning towards one of the more difficult characters to work with the next time around and I imagine there might be an easy out in utilizing Mogo to help draw some of this to a close, but it’s uncertain exactly what the plan really is here.
Grade: B-
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: October 21st, 2015
MSRP: $2.99
